


Maiden No More: Rape Culture in Tess of the D'urbervilles

by 100indecisions



Series: Fandom non-fiction [7]
Category: Tess of the d'Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
Genre: Academic Paper, Canonical Rape/Non-con, Essay, Essays, F/M, Literature, Rape Culture, Rape/Non-con References, Sexual Assault, Sexual Politics, fandom nonfiction, feminist criticism
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-12-15
Updated: 2013-03-15
Packaged: 2017-12-05 10:10:50
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 4
Words: 8,032
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/721872
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/100indecisions/pseuds/100indecisions
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Issues of coercion and sexual consent are at the forefront of Thomas Hardy’s <i>Tess of the D’urbervilles: A Pure Woman Faithfully Presented</i>, and the novel itself does not seem to present a solid conclusion on what exactly happened between Tess and Alec on the night that started her supposedly inevitable decline. Approaching the text from the viewpoint of modern feminist criticism and ideas about rape culture allows insights into Tess’s story that might not have been available to Hardy or his readers. I wrote this paper for a graduate class a few years ago.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Introduction and Literature Review

**Author's Note:**

> I originally wrote this paper for a graduate class in English a few years ago and later presented it at two local academic conferences--and both times, I won an award for it, so that was nice. The paper deals more with rape culture as a concept than with the actual act, and nothing is described explicitly (this is, after all, a literature analysis), but it's possible that this discussion could still be triggering. 
> 
> I've also divided this paper into sections for this posting because the overall work is pretty long.

Issues of coercion and sexual consent are at the forefront of Thomas Hardy’s _Tess of the D’Urbervilles: A Pure Woman Faithfully Presented_ , and the novel itself does not seem to present a solid conclusion on what exactly happened between Tess and Alec on the night that started her supposedly inevitable decline. Hardy tries to portray Tess as an innocent victim of both society’s conventions and traditional, tragic fate, and while he calls her a “pure woman” in the novel’s title, he still seems to attribute at least a portion of the blame to Tess, as if assuming that she was merely seduced, not raped. Approaching the text from the viewpoint of modern feminist criticism and ideas about rape culture allows insights into Tess’s story that might not have been available to Hardy or his readers. According to that viewpoint, Tess was indeed raped, regardless of the sequence of events Hardy leaves to the reader’s imagination; and the culture in which she lived—not fate—made this outcome and her treatment afterward a near inevitability.

Of particular note are the early interactions between Alec and Tess, with the strawberries he feeds to her over her objections and his description of the way he tamed his rebellious horse. From the beginning, Alec shows a willingness to override Tess’s choices and force from her a kind of consent or at least submission, encouraged by societal conventions that expect men to be sexual aggressors who assume women will flirt by playing at resistance. Tess, for her part, demonstrates an equally ingrained attitude of misplaced responsibility that keeps her in a situation she instinctively recognizes as dangerous, as well as a desire to be polite and ultimately submissive in response to Alec’s advances. At the same time, in following many of the era’s gender conventions in his pursuit of Tess, he also diminishes her personhood in that pursuit, essentially seeing her as something like his horse—an animal with enough spirit to require breaking, but one that it is his right to use and enjoy as he wishes. Alec does at least attempt to provide for Tess after taking advantage of her, which she refuses out of the sense of shame bred from her class and culture; Angel, presented as a good man, manages to objectify Tess even more completely in seeing her as damaged and used when she reveals her past to him, after which he seems to feel fully justified in abandoning her. His actions are possibly even less excusable than Alec’s, but they still fit within the modern feminist idea of rape culture.

Because these ideas surrounding sexual responsibility, coercion, consent, and seduction vs. rape form the basis of the entire plot for _Tess of the D’Urbervilles_ , most academic treatments of Hardy’s book focus on these topics in one way or another. Some articles take different angles on Tess, arguing that Hardy’s view of her as only happy as a child of nature also diminishes her personhood by essentially making her part of the landscape, but the most common subjects for analysis involve gender and sexuality. Elsie Michie’s “Horses and Sexual/Social Dominance” uses the treatment of horses in three Victorian novels, including _Tess_ , to demonstrate views toward both horses and women during that time period, specifically pointing out a scene in which Alec uses his horse’s speed and temper to frighten a kiss from Tess. Michie claims that these authors represent “social disruption through men who display a potential to dominate in their relation to sexually magnetic women and their ability to ride and control high-spirited horses” and links economic ideas to “the biological forces Darwin described, the aggression that leads to the survival of the fittest and the ineffable drives of sexual selection” (145). Reprehensible though Alec’s actions may be, he certainly demonstrates a sexual aggression that would—if only considered in terms of Darwinian biology and natural selection—be effective in propagating his particular version of the species. In this case, Alec’s ability to dominate a spirited (female) horse and willingness to harm the animal in order to make it useful to him can be easily compared with his treatment of Tess; he desired her physically and did not particularly care whether he harmed her, as long as he could eventually achieve dominance and gain what he wanted. In addition, Michie points out that Alec—like others in similar scenes of the other novels she studies—approaches the woman he desires when he is on horseback and she is on foot, again emphasizing his physical superiority to her. In fact, Alec deliberately uses his horse and gig to corner Tess at least once when he is trying to force her to cooperate with him, and again he is riding, she walking when they meet on the night of the rape.

Nina Auerbach’s “The Rise of the Fallen Woman” examines _Tess_ and similar novels within the context of this literary trope. “Conventionally, the fallen woman must die at the end of her story,” she says, “perhaps because death rather than marriage is the one implacable human change, the only honorable symbol of her fall’s transforming power” (35), and this is exactly the situation that occurs for Tess. She is supposedly still a pure woman throughout her entire ordeal, if Hardy’s subtitle is to be believed, but in her own viewpoint and that of Angel and society, she is tainted. She has fallen, and even though she earns a few days of happiness toward the end of her life, her death is still presented as almost inevitable, and rather than fighting it, she willingly submits so she will not live for Angel to change his mind about her yet again. _Tess of the D’Urbervilles_ could be interpreted as a challenge to this Victorian story of the fallen woman, and Hardy seems to present it as such with his insistence that society, not nature, has made Tess’s life miserable. As Auerbach points out, though,

> the structure of its narrative seems as subservient to the myth as Tess is here to Alec. Following the orthodox pattern, Tess begins in hopeful innocence, but goes from bad to worse after her fall divorces her from her girlhood self, her increasingly estranged condition aligning her with bare and open landscapes until her murder of Alec consummates her identity as outcast. (45)

Paris analyzes this strange conflict between Tess as a pure woman the way Hardy attempts to represent her, and the language Hardy actually uses in describing her. He calls the story “thematically unintelligible,” pointing out that while a good deal of the novel’s entire point is to establish Tess’s purity, it does not succeed in doing so in its own terms, let alone society’s (58).  “Tess is seen here as a victim, not a villain... It is quite bewildering, therefore, to find Hardy arguing also that Tess is pure because there is nothing wrong with what she has done, because there is nothing evil about her sexual relations with Alec” (63). Either she is an innocent victim who has been horribly violated and who might—but should not—feel guilt because society would like her to believe she was responsible, or she participated willingly in a natural act for which society should not have condemned her. She cannot be both, despite Hardy’s seemingly confused attempts to present her this way.

Caminero-Santangelo attempts to deal with this issue as well in his article “A Moral Dilemma: Ethics in _Tess of the D’Urbervilles,_ ” focusing on the ways both author and narrator try to portray the events of Tess’s life in mutually exclusive ways: Hardy “criticizes unfair social conventions which he believes cause the unjust judgment and oppression of Tess, but he also subscribes to conventional attitudes towards ‘feminine nature’ and to the belief that social law should correspond with natural law” (47). In imagining her as a sapling, transplanted from poisonous soil to new land where she could thrive, he shows her as being “‘in accord’ with benevolent nature” but removes her autonomy at the same time, making her “only an empty form to be molded by her environment” (48). At the same time, although Hardy tries to say that only social convention is responsible for Tess’s misery while nature does not condemn her, he also follows Darwinian ideas of natural selection and evolution to show nature as cruel and arbitrary. Caminero-Santangelo concludes, “The sequence of Tess’s life has a certain horrible inevitability, and yet there is no determining explanation which could make sense of it. Social injustice, nature, economic upheaval all offer partial explanations, but none of these factors can account entirely for Tess’s horrible fate” (54).

One of the most pertinent studies for this particular aspect of Tess’s story is William A. Davis, Jr.’s “The Rape of Tess: Hardy, English Law, and the Case for Sexual Assault,” which uses sexual-assault laws from Victorian times and Hardy’s notes and drafts on the rape of Tess to argue that Hardy did indeed consider it a rape, not seduction, and readers would have done the same. Although it could be argued that Victorian audiences would have been even less likely to view the situation as rape given the sexual standards of the time, Davis points out a number of details that “suggest the violent nature of Alec’s assault,” but “To an alert Victorian reader, however, these details would have confirmed rather than introduced the idea of rape. The rape of Tess actually begins with the passage that describes Tess’s sleep and her lack of verbal response—the passage, in short, that establishes her lack of consent to Alec’s advances” (223). He refers to English law to show that the courts only demanded a lack of consent on the woman’s part to consider a sexual encounter as rape, not the actual use of force, and that a woman who was asleep or otherwise unconscious, as Tess is when Alec returns to her, was incapable of giving such consent. In all likelihood, then, the British judicial system at the time would have interpreted Tess’s case as one of rape and ruled in her favor, although Hardy may have wanted to prevent exactly this situation because he wanted to portray the plight of working-class women, who had so little access to or knowledge of the law that they were effectively outside its influence.

Why, then, does Hardy seem to spend the rest of the novel interpreting Tess’s past as one of seduction, not rape? Davis points out that at the beginning of the book’s second section, “Hardy replaces his earlier focus upon sexual assault with a new focus on seduction and on Tess’s complicity in a sexual relationship of several weeks’ duration,” and it is this seduction that forms the basis of the book’s plot from that point onward (228). Even in his personal comments on the novel, Hardy tended to emphasize the seduction aspect of the story rather than the rape, perhaps because he wanted readers to focus on moral rather than legal issues and to come to the conclusion that Tess could be considered pure even if she had somewhat willingly engaged in premarital sex. Considering Hardy’s deliberate framing of the rape scene as such rather than seduction, however, this still results in an odd dissonance between the first section of the book and the rest of the story. Davis concludes,

> If the references to sleep and the administering of spirits are instances of Hardy’s use of his legal knowledge...then we must conclude that Hardy thought of the event in the Chase as a rape. Alec’s brutal mastery of Tess through rape makes possible his subsequent mastery of her through seduction. Hardy wants the equation to read a particular way: Tess is seduced _because_ she was raped. (230, emphasis added)  

Sarah Conly’s article “Seduction, Rape, and Coercion” takes a slightly different approach, using Tess’s situation as an example for examining various levels of coercion that might lie somewhere between seduction and rape. Ultimately, she agrees with Davis and most other critics that Tess was raped, but she comes to this conclusion from a somewhat different angle. Because Hardy does not tell readers exactly what happened in the Chase, it is impossible to know for certain whether Alec’s rape of Tess was physically violent, so Conly does not focus on this aspect. Instead she analyzes various forms of psychological and verbal coercion that could be present in cases of non-consensual sex, arguing that regardless of the precise circumstances, Alec’s actions still consisted of rape because he held a position of power over Tess. She considers intent, choice, harm, and legitimacy to be the primary criteria for determining whether a situation can be classified as coercion, saying that for an offer to be considered coercive, it must not only constrain the chooser’s options but must do so illegitimately, not allowing the other person to make a free choice. In Tess’s case, the use of psychological coercion and the financial power Alec held over her and her family seem to have proved sufficient, and Conly discusses the various kinds of coercion that eventually caused Tess to give way:

> The aggressor may implore and wheedle until the other feels guilt; he may tease her with jealousy, berate her for her coldness and immaturity, chastise her for the harm she does him, refute her reasoning when she tries to articulate her position, and subject her to a barrage of angry words. Ultimately she may find herself in a state of psychological exhaustion, feeling unable to resist in the face of what seems an implacable will. In these cases, it is argued, the woman has been forced against her will as surely as if the aggressor had used physical violence. (104)

In a similar way, the threat of physical force is another form of coercion that does not allow a free choice but does not cause actual, physical harm; this situation would certainly be considered rape, and psychological coercion functions the same way. “For a choice to be coerced, however,” Conly says, “it is necessary that the person doing the choosing has no reasonable choice between doing what the coercer wants and the bad option which the coercer has introduced” (106). Although Conly does not describe this particular aspect in terms of Tess’s situation, the lack of choice is still relevant: Tess feels responsible for her family’s dire financial straits, so if the choice becomes one of utter poverty for her family or unwanted sex with Alec, she is likely to choose the second option and, in fact, does so at least once. Conly does come down on the side of rape with _Tess of the D’Urbervilles_ , but she focuses primarily on this single incident, rather than questioning the difference between the event in the Chase as rape and what happened after as seduction, or even examining Tess’s situation after the rape at all.


	2. Rape Culture

Even among critics who argue that Hardy shows feminist attitudes in his “sensitive depiction of the wronged Tess” and “powerful criticism of social convention” (as claimed by the back cover for the edition used here), most seem to agree that Tess was raped, not merely seduced. Except for Davis, however, few seem to deal with the odd issue of Hardy’s treatment of that rape, where it is presented as such up to the actual event and then treated afterward as seduction, thereby rendering a significant portion of the author’s entire point confusing at best. Modern feminist ideas about rape culture are particularly useful here, because they help explain the behavior of characters in the text and the behavior of Hardy as the author of the text. These ideas may be relatively recent, but their application does not have to be, and they apply both to the original text and to newer adaptations of it.

One of the earliest usages of the term “rape culture” comes from Dianne Herman’s chapter of the same name in _Women: A Feminist Perspective_. She describes the similarity between ideas of normal heterosexual relations and rape:

> Normal heterosexual relations are pictured as consisting of an aggressive male forcing himself on a female who seems to fear sex but unconsciously wants to be overpowered. … Thus it is very difficult in our society to differentiate rape from “normal” heterosexual relations. Indeed, our culture can be characterized as a rape culture because the image of heterosexual intercourse is based on a rape model of sexuality. (21)

When Herman wrote this article in 1984, rape was one of the most unreported and unconvicted crimes in the country, and it remains so today, in large part because the credibility of rape victims is questioned more than that of victims of any other crime. Herman describes police officers actually asking such questions as “How many orgasms did you have?” and “Didn’t I pick you up last week for prostitution?” (28), further reinforcing these cultural ideas that conflate rape with appropriate, consensual sex. Because men are viewed as sexual aggressors, this aggressiveness is seen as a necessary element of their masculinity; at the same time, women are taught to play “hard to get” and to flirt by initially rebuffing suitors even if they are actually interested, but they are also taught that it is unfeminine to be rude or cold. The culture teaches men that _no_ does not mean _no_ and that they have a right to assert their masculinity through forced sex if necessary, and that women can consent through their clothing or behavior even if they have actually said _no_. When rape occurs, the rapist often defends his actions and blames the victim, perhaps for turning him on or not fighting him strenuously enough, and society tends to take the same stance—as, in many cases, do the victims themselves. It is difficult to find justice for a crime like this when even the victim has been conditioned to believe that she was fully or partly responsible…exactly as Tess appears to do.

Published shortly before Herman’s article, Shotland and Goodstein’s study on perceptions of rape presents many of the same facts, even if it does not use the specific term “rape culture.” Their article describes the factors that were more and less likely to result in others seeing a given situation as rape. In particular, they referred to previous studies that backed up their analysis, most of which showed that the majority of participants did not consider acquaintance rape to be actual rape; in fact, a 1976 report showed that less than twenty percent of a sample of adult women who read a description of a forced-sex incident on a date labeled it as rape. Another study found that subjects tended to be sexually aroused to the same degree by written descriptions of acquaintance rape and consensual sex, while this correlation did not occur with descriptions of rape by a stranger (220). Acquaintance rape, then, might well be seen “as within the realm of normative sex acts.” Other studies indicated that even women who had actually experienced acquaintance rape were far less likely to label the encounter as rape, simply because the rapist was known to them. In general, acquaintance rape is far less likely to be perceived as genuine rape, so Shotland and Goodstein’s study attempted to discover why. The answer, they said, seemed related again to ideas of what was normal among couples who were dating or were otherwise familiar with each other, and although this was applied to modern demographics at the time and is likely similar to what studies would show today, the parallels between the attitudes described and the situation in _Tess of the D’Urbervilles_ is striking:

> Several authors suggest that it is commonly accepted for a woman to conceal her genuine interest in sexual contact and merely suggest her intentions in subtle or symbolic ways... In addition, Zellman, et al.., found that males were particularly likely to hold this belief, with 50% of a sample of male high school students agreeing that it was acceptable to force a girl to have sexual intercourse when she initially consents but then changes her mind, or when she has sexually excited him. Conversely, cultural beliefs about the dating situation hold that a woman is expected to resist a man’s advances at least in the beginning stages of a sexual encounter, even though she may be responsive and ultimately consent to having sexual relations. ...a study...found that after reading an account of forced intercourse on a date in which the woman said “no,” males were more likely than females to believe that the woman in the story was interested in sex and to view her as responsible for the fact that intercourse occurred. Thus, it appears that some men may underrate a woman’s verbal protests and overrate her expressions of friendliness in their attempts to facilitate a sexual encounter. (221)

It would be highly disingenuous of Alec to insist that Tess had, in fact, participated with full willingness and consent, since it is clear that she has refused him up until that point, but these cultural attitudes would still have been in play at the time and could have allowed Alec to believe—or claim—that Tess was only seduced. She certainly seems to have accepted this interpretation, at least after the fact, and so does Hardy.

Alec’s wrongful actions do not begin with the rape, however, nor do they end there. A number of early scenes between him and Tess demonstrate the potential for his later assault even before Hardy has foreshadowed that such an event will take place, and they are precisely the kinds of behaviors Gavin de Becker describes in _The Gift of Fear: Survival Signals That Protect Us From Violence_. De Becker is one of the nation’s leading experts on predicting and thereby avoiding violent behavior, and his book uses studies, statistics, and various stories from his own and others’ personal experience to illustrate the importance of intuition in potentially dangerous situations. He addresses much of his book toward women specifically, pointing out that the majority of sexual assaults are carried out by men against women, and describes ways for readers to identify the moment a situation becomes dangerous so they can save their own lives. While de Becker also does not refer to the specific term “rape culture,” the ideas behind it still appear frequently in his book, as when he describes the cultural messages women receive that can lead them into dangerous situations: “A woman is expected, first and foremost, to respond to every communication from a man. And the response is expected to be one of willingness and attentiveness. It is considered attractive if she is a bit uncertain” (58). In an ordinary social setting, these kinds of reactions might only lead to an unwanted conversation; in the situations de Becker analyzes, these social expectations become weapons that attackers can use to control their prospective victims. His description of an attacker’s technique for selecting the right victim for him, which de Becker calls “the interview,” is particularly relevant to Tess’s case. One such interaction took place between a woman and the man who stalked her, when they first met at a party and he needed to see if he could control her:

> Bryan would not pursue a woman who could really say and mean no, though he is very interested in one who initially says no and then gives in…  
> Bryan: Can I get you something to drink?   
> Katherine: No, but thank you.  
> Bryan: Oh, come on, what’ll you have?  
> Katherine: Well, I could have a soft drink, I guess.  
> This may appear to be a minor exchange, but it is actually a very significant test. Bryan found something she said no to, tried a light persuasion, and Katherine gave in, perhaps just because she wanted to be nice. He will next try one a notch more significant, than another, then another, and finally he’s found someone he can control. (208)

In that instance, Bryan wanted a relationship that he could control, even if he could not find anything more meaningful, but similar techniques can be used to test victims for more violent assaults. De Becker opens the book with the example of Kelly, a woman who was raped by a young man who originally approached to help with her groceries when she was going up the stairs to her apartment. Her intuition made her uneasy, but she ignored it, and when she let him take one of her bags even though she had told him _no_ , control of the situation (and thus Kelly herself) passed to him. “When Kelly said no but then agreed,” de Becker says, “it wasn’t really no anymore… Declining to hear ‘no’ is a signal that someone is either seeking control or refusing to relinquish it” (62).

Seen from this point of view, Alec’s actions the very first time he meets Tess take on an even more sinister cast. They fit precisely into de Becker’s idea of the criminal’s interview in determining his victim: within minutes of meeting her, Alec asks a relatively low-stakes question to which she initially answers no, but he is able to override her objection immediately:

> …presently, selecting a specially fine product of the “British Queen” variety [of strawberry], he stood up and held it by the stem to her mouth.  
> “No—no!” she said quickly, putting her fingers between his hand and her lips. “I would rather take it in my own hand.”  
> “Nonsense!” he insisted; and in a slight distress she parted her lips and took it in. (42)

The strawberry itself is not really at issue here; in many ways, neither is the fact that this scene can easily be interpreted sexually, as it was treated in the 2008 BBC adaptation. Rather—whether or not Alec would have framed it this way to himself—it shows Alec testing his quarry with something that does not matter much, in and of itself, and Tess quickly relinquishes control, even if she does not realize she is doing so. She explicitly tells him no, even puts up a hand to block the strawberry, but he is insistent and she is polite, and more to the point, she is painfully aware that he may be the only thing standing between her family and financial ruin. She believes she cannot afford to anger him, so she allows this small physical violation—it only causes her “slight distress,” after all, and clearly she had no objection to the strawberries themselves—and in doing so allows Alec to set the stage for every encounter that follows.


	3. Rape Culture in Tess of the D'Urbervilles

It is not long before Alec is ignoring Tess’s objections in areas more important than strawberries, a development that seems to catch Tess off guard but would certainly not surprise de Becker. Her intuition clearly warns her to stay away from Alec, but she feels she cannot because of the misplaced sense of responsibility her immature parents allow her to bear. When Alec comes to bring her to his home, she feels not just indecision but actual misgiving, which she silences because of that sense of responsibility. Almost immediately Alec proves her misgivings to be founded in reality and not in “sentimental grounds” as she thinks of them later (57). Before he only forced on her a strawberry in a way she did not prefer; now he deliberately frightens her by allowing his horse to take their cart downhill at dangerously high speeds, and then scolds her for her temper and ingratitude when she exclaims “Safe, thank God, in spite of your folly!” at the bottom of the hill. Seeing another way of getting what he wants, Alec escalates his pressure on Tess when they come to another hill—yet again he races down, fully aware Tess is frightened and ignoring her cry of “No, no! …Show more sense, do, please” (55). This time, he is not satisfied with scaring her, in part because she will not unthinkingly grab hold of him as she did during the previous descent. He tells her to put her arms around his waist again; she refuses; so he says, “Let me put one little kiss on those holmberry lips, Tess; or even on that warmed cheek, and I’ll stop—on my honour, I will!” What honor Alec might refer to is a bit unclear, considering he has already ignored Tess’s explicitly stated objections twice in the last few minutes alone, and is now attempting to force a kiss from her in response to her legitimate fear for their lives. Tess does not actually say no at this point, but she makes her lack of consent clear—she slides back on her seat, prompting Alec to urge the horse on yet faster, and then “‘Will nothing else do?’ she cried at length, in desperation, her large eyes staring at him like those of a wild animal.” Even at this point, it would be a stretch for Alec to think that Tess is only flirting; rather, he seems inclined to take what he wants from her regardless of her wishes.

But Alec is not done yet. Angered when, at the last second, Tess almost involuntarily avoids his kiss, he lashes out, “Now, damn it—I’ll break both our necks! So you can go from your word like that, you young witch, can you?” Even if he is not speaking in earnest, he has now graduated to actual threats of violence, even aside from insulting Tess for her desire to avoid sexual harassment. More importantly, his pride has been stung, and if he only wanted a quick kiss from Tess by way of a test, now he is determined to take it from her. Now, too, she again makes her lack of consent explicit: “‘But I don’t want anybody to kiss me, sir!’ she implored, a big tear beginning to roll down her face, and the corners of her mouth trembling in her attempts not to cry. …He was inexorable, and she sat still, and D’Urberville gave her the kiss of mastery” (56). Tess immediately wipes her cheek with her handkerchief, in another unconscious gesture that further angers Alec with its attempt to undo the kiss, and his pride is wounded further. He threatens her again with yet another wild ride down a final hill, “unless…you agree willingly to let me do it again, and no handkerchief,” which seems an odd way to phrase it when true willingness cannot exist with coercion of this kind. Tess reluctantly agrees but manages to escape the cart by letting her hat blow away, and after she has retrieved it, she refuses to climb back up beside Alec. Once more, Alec escalates the situation because of his anger:

> “You artful hussy! Now, tell me—didn’t you make that hat blow off on purpose? I'll swear you did!”
> 
> Her guarded silence confirmed his suspicion.
> 
> Then D’Urberville cursed and swore at her, and called her everything he could think of for the trick. Turning the horse suddenly he tried to drive back upon her, and so hem her in between the gig and the hedge. But he could not do this short of injuring her. (57)

At this point he is not actually willing to hurt her physically—it is possible he never does—but even his word choices are illustrative of his attitude toward women in general and Tess in particular. Tess is an “artful hussy” because she has protested and evaded his coercive attempts to kiss her, something she would only have done in the way she did if she were in fact innocent and inexperienced. But this is the culture in which Tess and Alec live: he can demand kisses from her that he has no right to demand, he can use various kinds of coercive force to gain those kisses, and he can feel justifiably angry when she finds a way to avoid kissing him.

Alec’s last statement in this scene is equally interesting, if only because it proves him either to lack the honor he claimed to have two pages ago or to hold the firm idea that he seduced and did not rape Tess. Her fury at him results in rather condescending amusement on his part, and he says, “Come, let there be peace. I’ll never do it again against your will. My life upon it now!” Whether the rape was physically against Tess’s will is still a matter of debate, because Hardy leaves it up to the reader’s imagination, but considering the many times Tess had already told him _no_ , it is clear that their sexual encounter did happen against her will. In the true manner of a rape culture, however, the ideas Alec was used to likely encouraged him to believe that he had eventually won her over, not forced her. Perhaps she said no, but women were supposed to do that; they did not really mean it. Perhaps she struggled a little—perhaps a lot—but that was only part of a little exciting foreplay, part of the natural role of the man to dominate the woman. Alec does not know, however, that his last sentence is as serious as any oath, even if he clearly does not mean it at the time; after all, he eventually pays for his repeated trespass with his life, but it falls to Tess to fulfill that promise, rather than this landed and supposedly honorable aristocrat.

One remaining note about this scene: earlier, when Alec is still in a playful mood and is using his horse’s fast pace to frighten Tess only a little, he describes the horse thus: “Tib has killed one chap; and just after I bought her she nearly killed me. And then, take my word for it, I nearly killed her. But she’s queer still, very queer…” (54). One might think this passage had been written deliberately for Michie’s argument about horses and social/sexual dominance rather than the other way around. Alec is using his physical mastery of this horse to prove his ability to dominate this new strong-willed female on whom he has set his sights, and as he was entirely willing to use near-fatal violence to mold his spirited horse to his will, he is also willing to use various means of coercion to make Tess into the woman he wants, the woman who will be the most convenient and pleasing for him. In what may be a curious bit of foreshadowing, though, Tib seems something of a mirror image of Tess in the animal kingdom. Alec nearly killed Tib in order to break her, and during their struggle Tib came close to killing Alec himself; in a way, Alec destroys Tess when he breaks her to his will, but in the end, she kills him for it…and then she is killed in turn, Alec’s influence on her extending past his death.

These early interactions set the tone for the rest of Tess’s relationship with Alec, and the conversations recorded between their meeting and the rape only strengthen the control Alec has already gained. He comes upon her trying to teach herself to whistle and says, “Well then—I’ll give you a lesson or two,” to which Tess responds, “Oh no, you won’t!” and physically moves away from him. “Nonsense,” he says, which seems to be a favorite tactic of his, to dismiss Tess’s objections as childishness barely worthy of recognition. He stays, and instructs her, and she does what she is told in hopes that it will get rid of him faster. Instead, she has again demonstrated that, for her, _no_ does not really mean _no_ (62). In some ways, then, Alec’s gallant rescue that turns into assault is not a very great surprise; all the indicators are there.

Even in the scenes leading up to the rape itself, Alec continues to demonstrate the behaviors that allow him to control Tess. He pries from her the confession that she is angry with him because of all the times he has tried to win her over, but her anger does not bother him: “He knew that anything was better than frigidity” (69). Tess’s hesitancy could be nothing more than a sexually inexperienced girl’s misgivings about something new and unsettling, after all, and as he has proven to himself and to Tess before, her objections can be overridden, because she cannot afford to be cold and dismissive. He tries to hold her against him on the saddle, to which she reacts by pushing him a little away, and he says, “That is devlish unkind! ….I mean no harm—only to keep you from falling.” His previous actions might indicate that he always has an ulterior motive, and Tess is suspicious, but eventually she relents and begs his pardon, “humbly,” because she has been raised to assume the best of others and to assume any rudeness on her part is unjustified. Alec is not assuaged; he bursts out, “I won’t pardon you unless you show some confidence in me. Good God! What am I, to be repulsed by a mere chit like you? For near three mortal months you have trifled with my feelings, eluded me, and snubbed me; and I won’t stand it!” (70). In reality, of course, Tess is too innocent to play the coquette, and likely would not want to even if she knew how, but Alec’s cultural upbringing allows him to accuse her thus—effectively—without having proven himself remotely worthy of her confidence or entertained the possibility that she might truly want nothing to do with him. Instead, he uses her sense of guilt to indebt her to him just a little further, enough to get them into The Chase without her notice, and when she does realize he has deliberately taken them well out of their way, she is understandably angry at being used: “‘How could you be so treacherous!’ said Tess, between archness and real dismay, and getting rid of his arm by pulling open his fingers one by one… ‘Just when I’ve been putting such trust in you, and obliging you to please you, because I thought I had wronged you by that push!’” (71). Alec may accuse Tess of being an “artful hussy,” but clearly he has been the manipulative one in all of these situations.

Alec steals a “hearty kiss” before letting her down from the horse, promising to find a way out of The Chase but no doubt considering what he might do, now that they are alone in the woods. He chooses this moment to inform Tess that he has given a new horse to her father, knowing her feelings of gratitude and further indebtedness to him will make her more malleable; then, once he has gotten her to sit down (“passively”) on his coat, he takes a druggist’s bottle from his saddlebags and holds it “to her mouth unawares.” Tess sputters, coughs, protests that it will ruin her dress, and submits to drinking it to protect her clothes, because—as before—Alec shows no inclination of stopping just because he is doing something to Tess that she does not want him to do. The rape itself takes on a definite sense of inevitability, in light of everything that has come before it, but that inevitability stems not from classical fate or doom or simple societal prejudices, as Hardy seems to argue; instead, it happens because Tess and Alec inhabit a rape culture. They both behaved in the ways their cultural upbringings had taught them to, which does not excuse Alec’s actions but likely helped him see them as considerably less heinous than they were, and therefore allowed him to excuse his behavior to himself.

This much, at least, is not Hardy’s fault: he lived in this culture as well, and he seems to have represented it as faithfully as he could, showing the social conventions that led Tess to disaster. The clear idea that the rest of the community sees Tess as culpable—that her family, Angel Clare, and Tess herself saw in her an odd mix of victimhood and willing sinfulness—is also understandable, at least in that all these attitudes can still be seen today. As Herman described, victims are themselves less likely to consider nonconsensual sex as rape if the rapist is an acquaintance, and even if the victim does report the rape, police and members of the judicial system are just as likely to blame the victim in some way. The true difficulty with Hardy’s story and his attempt to challenge social conventions is that Hardy is still allowing the rape culture to influence his writing, and it is Tess who pays. Davis calls _Tess of the D’Urbervilles_ “thematically unintelligible,” and so it is, particularly if one does not have Davis’s interpretation available. Hardy tells his readers that “an immeasurable chasm” divided Tess’s previous personality from that after the rape, but a similar chasm seems to exist in the narrative between Phase the First and Phase the Second. If Tess was raped, even if society blames her and leads her to blame herself, the novel could deal with this issue and allow Tess to come to terms with the fact that she was violated and she herself did not commit any violation—but instead the entire rest of the book deals with the sexual encounter as seduction, not rape. Tess finds a measure of freedom in deciding—or trying to decide—that she is still pure, still an agentive woman with a chance of happiness, despite society’s general condemnation and the shame in her past. Angel comes to essentially the same conclusion, even if it is far too little, far too late, and she does briefly take exception to his new view of her as damaged goods, an entirely different person, not the woman he loved at all, even though he admits that she was “more sinned against than sinning” (232). In Angel’s view of the situation as in Tess’s, Tess _did_ sin, and she did commit an act for which society condemned her, and her protest that his sin was just like hers comes to no effect. In truth, their pasts are nothing alike: Angel did something foolish, temporary, and consensual, while Tess had the same act done _to_ her. Every event leading up to the rape paints it as exactly that, meaning that the “shame” in Tess’s past is no shame at all—a trauma, certainly, but not a shame for which society and Angel should justly reject her, nor one for which she should accept that rejection.

But this is the situation Hardy presents, forcing readers (and characters) to reconcile the “immeasurable chasm” between the innocent Tess who was forcibly raped, and the slightly more experienced Tess who had apparently allowed herself to be seduced into a sexual relationship of some weeks’ duration. Davis’s interpretation is the only one that makes sense in this situation—Hardy viewed the attack itself as rape but treated it thereafter as seduction, perhaps because he wanted readers to think about what actually constituted purity in a person, to see that purity could come from the oneness with nature Tess often seems to possess rather than from physical virginity. But if Hardy wants to argue against social conventions toward women, why would he not make the morality of the matter more clear-cut? Tess is raped, and because she lives in a rape culture, she is treated _as if_ she were seduced, but Hardy and the reader know she was not, and eventually Tess and Angel come to the same conclusion; or, Tess is seduced because she is innocent in the ways of the world and she deals with the consequences of her actions, gradually gaining some understanding of the events of her girlhood and forgiving herself or determining that she was not wrong in the first place. Either route would examine the impact of past events on a person’s entire future and would seem to keep Hardy’s message essentially the same while lending a good deal more thematic consistency to the book.

Instead, we can only come to Davis’s conclusion, that Tess was raped _then_ seduced, and that the rape allowed the seduction to take place. Taking this view, Alec is still at fault, and Tess is still reasonably innocent but somewhat responsible for her actions. Even this fails to satisfy, however, and I can see two other possible interpretations, both of which likely operate here. Hardy conceived of the entire affair this way because he too lived in a rape culture and did not realize it, so despite trying to subvert literary conventions with his treatment of Tess, he still stayed very close to those very conventions. Tess had sex before marriage; society would see her as a fallen woman; therefore something must have occurred to make that perception at least somewhat valid. If Tess were truly innocent and utterly wronged, and she truly believed that, she would not bear the guilt that leads her to participate in her own subjugation to Angel and present her confession the way she does. Tess fits the model of the fallen woman; therefore she must see herself as unworthy of happiness; and, perhaps importantly, she may only find redemption through the act of dying. As written, she presents a problem Hardy seems to have been unable to solve.

At the same time, applying modern ideas about rape culture to Tess’s story, an equally likely interpretation could call Tess’s entire relationship with Alec an extended rape. That was how it started, after all, which would not make a legitimate beginning to any relationship; after that, Alec’s manipulations and Tess’s upbringing could have convinced her that she _had_ been seduced, that she _had_ led Alec on, teased him, made his actions inevitable, and now that she had already fallen, she was trapped with this decision she thought she had made, still further in Alec’s thrall, with few recourses left. All of Alec’s earlier coercion remained in effect—he was still potentially responsible for the Durbeyfields’ financial well-being, he was older than Tess, he was a man, he was a wealthy relation, he was a landed aristocrat and she was a poor farm girl, and now that she had already slept with him, what else could she do?

By the time Tess left Alec, then, she firmly believed she had been seduced, when she had never been offered a free choice in the first place. Tess had been conditioned to believe that her own weakness made her tragedy inevitable, and it was this—the rape culture that permeated her entire life, that pushed her to blame herself and accept society’s judgment even as she railed against it—that truly doomed her. As for Hardy, it is his seeming lack of awareness about this particular aspect that makes this book, ultimately, a textbook example of rape culture.


	4. Works Cited

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> What it says on the tin.

**Works Cited**

Auerbach, Nina. “The Rise of the Fallen Woman.” _Nineteenth-Century Fiction_ 35.1 (1980): 29-52. Print.

Caminero-Santangelo, Byron. “A Moral Dilemma: Ethics in Tess of the D’Urbervilles. _English Studies_ 75.1 (1994): 46-62. Print.

Davis, William A., Jr. “The Rape of Tess: Hardy, English Law, and the Case for Sexual Assault.” _Nineteenth-Century Literature_ 52.2 (1997): 221-231. Print.

De Becker, Gavin. _The Gift of Fear: Survival Signals That Protect Us From Violence_. New York: Dell Publishing, 1999. Print.

Hardy, Thomas. _Tess of the D’Urbervilles: A Pure Woman Faithfully Represented._ Ed. Tim Dolin. London: Penguin Books, 2003. Print.

Herman, Dianne. “The Rape Culture.” _Women: A Feminist Perspective._ Ed. Jo Freeman. 3rd ed. Palo Alto, Ca.: Mayfield Publishing Co., 1984. 20-38. Print.

Michie, Elsie B. “Horses and Sexual/Social Dominance.” _Victorian Animal Dreams: Representations of Animals in Victorian Literature and Culture_. Ed. Deborah Denenholz Morse and Martin A. Danahay. Hamsphire, UK: Ashgate Publishing, 2007. Print.

Paris, Bernard J. “‘A Confusion of Many Standards’: Conflicting Value Systems in Tess of the d’Urbervilles.” _Nineteenth-Century Fiction_ 24.1 (1969), 57-79. Print.

Shotland, Lance R. and Lynne Goodstein. “Just Because She Doesn’t Want to Doesn’t Mean It’s Rape: An Experimentally Based Causal Model of the Perception of Rape in a Dating Situation.” _Social Psychology Quarterly_ 46.3 (1983): 220-232. Print.


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